Colour Blindness
When colours cannot properly be distinguished form one another, this may have serious consequences. One only has to think of traffic lights, the colours of electricity cables, on/off buttons of machines, coloured pills, stickers on medicine and toxic substances. And more recently since the introduction of electronic colour displays, all kind of colour-coded information and warning signals on control panels in process industry and power plants.
In everyday matters, too, colour blindness may cause much inconvenience and confusion. Examples are illegible road maps, graphs and tables in study books, indistinguishable buttons and dials of (parking ticket) dispensers, invisible lines on the floors of sports facilities and invisible texts on TV and computer screens. Also the use of colour in brochures for advertising and for other information often leaves much to be desired. Designers are not generally aware of this problem. This is really a sorry state of affairs, considering that it is generally quite feasible to use colours that the colour-blind are able to deal with. In short, colour blinds are mainly handicapped by the inconsiderate use of functional colours.

Blind Colour
An initiative of a scientist and a businessman, the latter also colour-blind himself, led to the creation of BLIND COLOR. This organization aims at making society and industry aware of the problems that colour-blind have. Where possible, they indicate and demonstrate how those problems can be overcome.
BLIND COLOR advises many organizations, from the European Central Bank for the colour of the Euro bank notes, to a producer of road maps and (GPS) navigation systems.

One of the recent successes of BLIND COLOR is the creation of the (draft) norm NPR 7022. It is expected that after formalizing the current draft, the norm will be considered to become part of the European ISO norm. NPR 7022 deals with the functional use of colour, accommodating colour vision disorders.
The norm helps to prevent mistakes and accidents as a consequence of colour blinds not being able to distinguish colour. Manufacturers, designers and other users of this norm will have to create or adapt their products in such a way that people that can only distinguish part of the colour spectrum can handle them. The norm also gives indication for redundant coding. This is combining two or more indications of functionality (e.g. colour combined with shape).

Pride
We are proud that for the identification of the functional colours for the ISO / NPR 7022 guideline, colours have been identified and specified using the ACC codification concept. This tool allowed the unambiguous identification of 12 colours that have optimal properties when combined, to be distinguishable for the colour blind.

The colours can be created in a variety of product qualities, using the functionality of the Crown Paints' Mixing Machine concept. Stockists can be identified using the store locator function of this web site.